Netflix has become expert at putting enticing titles on its documentaries: The Tinder Swindler, Worst Roommate Ever, The Predator of Seville - all designed to be irresistibly clickable. The latest, Should I Marry a Murderer? has to be one of their most attention-grabbing yet.
The story is certainly memorable. Tillicoultry cyclist, Tony Parsons, is on a solo charity fundraising ride in the Highlands when he disappears.
Years pass and still his family have heard nothing. Then a young pathologist from Glasgow is told by her boyfriend that while driving drunk he hit the cyclist and buried the body. Shown the site, she marked the spot surreptitiously and later called the police.
So began a process that would end in a murder trial, deliver answers to a grieving family and, as far as the pathologist was concerned, wreck her life.
Mr Parsons disappeared in 2017. If the case seems more recent it could be because a BBC documentary, Murder Case: the Vanishing Cyclist, aired last August. It was a considered, almost scholarly (in television terms), look at a case that naturally sparked strong emotions.
This new documentary is very far from that style. Dr Caroline Muirhead, whose help led to Mr Parsons’ body being found, did not appear in the BBC film but takes front and centre here.
Confident and articulate, at first I thought it was an actor playing a part. In my review copy there had been none of the usual “alerts” about actors and recreated scenes. But a search produced a press agency photo that confirmed it was her.
Her manner sat oddly, and what she had to say seemed inappropriate in the circumstances.
Here she is, for example, describing her position: “To remain in love you have to keep this secret that you know is gonna destroy you. But if you reveal it, then you destroy everything. What do you do?” And when she first meets the man who became her boyfriend: “He had that smell of smoke and sweat and a bit of aftershave.”
Making Ms Muirhead the focus of the film, regardless of how good a story it is, takes away from the victim and his family. It also invites the viewer to judge her. Her character, choices and lifestyle are not on trial, but sometimes it feels that way.
More of a problem is that Ms Muirhead and the filmmakers have serious points to make about the support given, or not given, to witnesses in sensitive cases such as this. As captions tell us at the end, she made multiple complaints against Police Scotland, but after a five-year investigation, the majority were not upheld. Police Scotland and Victim Support Scotland declined to take part in the film.
The “noise” around the three-part story detracts from that. Did we really need yet another scene of her drinking herself into oblivion to know she needed help? Ultimately, it’s for the viewer to decide if this was a story that needed to be told in this particular style.
My doubts remain.
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